1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a hard disk drive manufacturing process, and more particularly, to a unified test system for testing the performance of a printed circuit board assembly and a test method using the same.
2. Related Art
Among processes for manufacturing a hard disk drive used as an auxiliary storage device of a computer, an in-circuit testing (ICT) process and a function circuit testing (FCT) process are used to test the performance of a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA).
In the in-circuit testing process, the soldering quality of a printed circuit board assembly produced through a surface mounting device (SMD) process and the quality of each circuit element are tested in a unit of parts to detect defects, for example, whether any parts are shorted or wrongly inserted. In the function circuit testing process, the printed circuit board assembly is connected, after the in-circuit testing process, to a head disk assembly (HDA) to test functions between the printed circuit board assembly and the head disk assembly and a read/write capability.
Generally, hard disk drive manufacturers separately implement the above two processes, so it takes a long time to test the performance of the printed circuit board assembly. Further, since the printed circuit board assembly and the head disk assembly should manually be connected with each other to implement the in-circuit testing and function circuit testing processes, there are required many workers, and productivity may be lowered due to manual work. Moreover, since the head disk assembly connected to test the performance of the printed circuit board assembly may be damaged due to a defective printed circuit board assembly or manual work, an economic loss may be incurred.
I have found that inefficient test methods and test devices can be extremely inconvenient. Efforts have been made to improve testing methods and devices.
Exemplars of recent efforts in the art include U.S. Pat. No. 5,777,480 for DEVICE FOR TESTING CONNECTOR HAVING MULTIPLE TERMINALS THEREIN issued to Hatagishi et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,831,438 for DEVICE FOR TESTING A CONNECTOR HAVING MULTIPLE TERMINALS THEREIN issued to Okura; U.S. Pat. No. 5,748,007 for UNIVERSAL TEST AND BURN-IN SOCKET ADAPTABLE TO VARYING IC MODULE THICKNESS issued to Gaschke; U.S. Pat. No. 4,626,780 for TRI-AXIS AUTOMATED TEST SYSTEM FOR PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARDS issued to Powers et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,214,374 for DUAL LEVEL TEST FIXTURE issued to St. Onge; U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,605 for DEVICE FOR TESTING CONTACTING AND/OR WIRING OF SOCKETS ON A CIRCUIT BOARD issued to Lang-Dahlke; U.S. Pat. No. 5,572,144 for TEST JIG AND METHOD FOR PROBING A PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD issued to Davidson et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,663,655 for ESD PROTECTION FOR UNIVERSAL GRID TYPE TEST FIXTURES issued to Johnston et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,884 for CONNECTOR TESTING DEVICE issued to Kodama; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,670,888 for METHOD FOR TRANSPORTING AND TESTING WAFERS issued to Cheng.
While these recent efforts provide advantages, I note that they fail to adequately provide an improved and convenient unified test system and test method.